Indium Tin Oxides (ITO) is good in electroconductivity and transparency, and thus is the most commonly used thin-film material of a transparent conductive electrode in an array substrate. At present, a patterning process is most commonly adopted for fabricating a transparent conductive electrode, namely, firstly forming a transparent conductive thin-film with a certain thickness on a substrate, forming a photoresist on the transparent conductive thin-film, and then obtaining the transparent conductive electrode with a specific pattern by using a mask plate through exposing, developing, etching, stripping and other processes.
However, at the etching phase of the above process, etching residue for ITO grain often appears, which may cause leakage current and short circuit, thus affecting the quality of product.